It’s obviously a hovercraft
This house is cracking. Some furniture you don’t like doesn’t make the house awful.
Furnishings are all hired for the photos/viewings from one of those property dressing companies, because apparently many buyers can’t imagine furnished rooms. Typically you can opt to buy these as a job lot from the property dresser. The overall look is simultaneously tacky & bland but really bad compared to most dressed places.
Sheetrock in the fireplaces is likely because the refurbishment isn’t yet 100% completed per the text. The inserts are either still at the restorers or still being recreated to the original design.
The restoration looks way too harsh in many areas, but if the house was in particularly bad shape before work began, it gets hard to fix damage and retain the softness of age whilst complying with building regs.
Spotlights, however, are death. Whichever heritage officer they worked with should have forbade them that.
Spotlights have very limited domestic use, and beyond a few applications, look hideous as well as offering poor function.
Also, is it the spots making the kitchen look AI generated?
Probably. Bright, wide-angle downlight dotted all over the damn ceiling create that uncanny valley look.
Struggling to think of any domestic application where they would not be an unreasonable choice - maybe a particularly small shower room where all of the walls where one might mount a wall light have some problem which means they cannot be used. Even then, ugh.
Under-cabinet is the best use I can think of. But rows of them in a white ceiling, especially I a living or bedroom area is yuck. I’d rather have an Artex ceiling!
I’d rather live in the dark, haha!
Okay beyond the taste in furniture upholstery and the fireplaces, this is a far cry from “terrible”. Place looks nice enough to me.
As for the AI claims- i wouldn’t be so sure, real estate photos are often heavily photoshopped, shot with wide lens and with more lights than necessary so I don’t know. Looks legit to me
Including the table.
Ewww
As for the sheetrock in the fireplace, why not at least just put in a gas burner for decoration?
Or, block the chimney, and put in a decorative grate with some logs, maybe add some holly?
Here is the thing about the fireplace.
On an old house like that where they burned wood and coal, it probably isn’t lined in any way. So it is raw brick without a ceramic “tile” going through it. Over time the mortar between the bricks deteriorate and creosote builds in the gaps between the bricks. That is a fire hazard and there is no way to remove that creosote. Using chemicals can dissolve the creosote, but then you also remove what is holding the bricks in place, which means the chimney structure is even more compromised and can cause collapse.
Selling a house with a known compromised chimney that is open and appears functional without disclosing the state of the chimney can open you up to legal issues. You can’t really feature the chimney/fireplace as part of the listing either, even if you disclose the state of it, because you will be dealing with lower offers.
So a gas burner, even a high efficiency one, can cause a fire hazard.
Leaving it open and just putting decorative wood on a log holder is a nightmare because creosote will fall down as the temperature changes and you may be constantly cleaning creosote or staining your carpet with difficult to remove stains. A lot of those old fireplaces are shallow and have the flue opening towards the front instead of being set back with a “smoke shelf” under it with a modern fireplace, so creosote can easily fall feet into the room.
Your options are to tear down the entire fireplace and chimney, ripping apart walls and spending tens of thousands of dollars, possibly reaching to the 5 figure range on a house like that. Alternatively you cap the top, throw some slate over the opening or wall it off and let some poor bastard in the future spend the money on getting a functioning chimney.
They made the practical choice, and I support it, even if it is not pretty.
If it’s a protected building in the UK, they might not even be allowed to modify the chimneys. They would need to be repaired/replaced to a very high historical standard which can be extremely cost prohibitive.
What they’ve done here may have been the only reasonable choice: block them off with something removable which doesn’t impact the structure.
I fully understand the practicality of it, century homes are a great interest of mine. That being said, I’ve seen a million different options to make it visually appealing. It’s a shame and a waste of beautiful architecture.
The only viable option to maintain the look is to seal up the flue and then you have to coat over the firebox if you don’t want the soot stained brickwork exposed.
That is probably a coal burning fireplace so it is very shallow, most I have seen are 14" or less deep. It is kind of silly to have a little nook fake real fireplace. I would have just walled it off and been glad to lose an inch on one wall if I couldn’t afford to renovate my century house.
this looks---- so ai generated…
